Four Thousand Promises Kept
Some stories only have one ending.
The inevitable ending of Scott Hutchison’s story arrived in the early morning hours of May 10, when his body was found in the water near Firth on Forth. The lead singer of the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit had done the very thing he had long fought doing, letting air out of the valve by expressing it through his music.
Like thousands of other fans, I saw a post on Instagram where Scott’s brother said he had gone missing, and they were worried about his safety. For the next two days, I would check my Tweetdeck column searching “Scott Hutchison” on my office or home computer almost hourly when I was awake.
Thousands of us were obsessed with a need to know ASAP. The fans were all Tweeting the same things. His songs pulled them out of their own dark places, and they hoped he would be able to rescue himself. He saved their lives. And they meant it.
Although I’ve never been on that ledge, I’ve apparently been gifted with a darkness that others can’t see and that I’m not good about sharing. Whenever I sink into that space, I fall back on certain movies and music to work through it, like I’m blind, trapped in someone’s strange basement without power, and following the sound of notes or words to find that light switch I just know is down there somewhere.
No other band led me to that light switch more often in the last decade than Frightened Rabbit.
And that’s where it goes. A man has ended his life, and he has left loved ones, relatives and friends who knew him and loved him and lived with and around him, to sift through the rubble of his wreck for the scraps of their hearts, and people like me are trying to drum up reasons and examples of why we’re so close to him and what he did for us.
For real fans, when tragedy strikes the object of our distant affection, even when we know, intellectually, that it’s not about us, it’s almost impossible to convince our hearts of that fact.
Scott Hutchison was a deeply depressed person, and everyone knew it. He not only wrote one song about how he might end his life; he wrote several. One of the most crushing love songs he ever wrote, “An Otherwise Disappointing Life,” is about how constantly he considers ending it all. “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” doesn’t work to hard at hiding the message.
“Floating in the Forth,” the song near the end of their breakthrough album, Midnight Organ Fight, promises he will save suicide for another day. He kept that promise for over 4,000 days.
It’s inevitable some will ponder whether Hutchison ended his life to add deeper meaning to this song. I get that. But that’s only possible if you believe Hutchison was bluffing in the first place.
To me, his songs about drowning, about wanting to end his suffering, weren’t bluffs, and they weren’t feints. They were visions he crafted, carefully and delicately, in his depressed mind, and I’m certain he hoped that writing them down and singing them out hundreds upon hundreds of times might eventually exorcise him.
In April — a mere month ago — the Hutchison brothers teamed up with two other Scotland musicians to release a “side project” under the name of Mastersystem. In hindsight, how can the album’s final song be anything less than what it is obviously intended to be: a final song?
It begins:
Do you wonder
Why the bird is bored of flying
and never asked to be alive
to be a bird and never cared for heights
It’s seen the earth for what is
The big ball of inconsequence
Still it sings
There’s such a place as too far
There’s a such a thing as too much
And we all want fire until it burns
We all want more until it starts to hurt
It concludes:
And I’ve come as far as I can go
Close enough to know
Bird is bored
Bored of flying
I’ve seen all that I care to see
Become what I don’t want to be
Bird is bored
Bored of flying
Scott Hutchison kept a promise for over 4,000 days. In those 4,000 days, he wrote over 70 songs for five different albums. I don’t know how many lives he saved, how many lives he’s altered or improved, but what I’m feeling — and fighting to keep feeling — is a deep, to-the-core-of-my-soul gratitude for how long he kept that promise.
He eventually gave into his vision. He eventually signed off with “I’m away now. Thanks.” He got bored of flying. He stopped hurting. In keeping himself out of the Forth for 4,000+ days, as he would surely acknowledge and as he sang so beautifully in “Head Rolls Off,” he made tiny changes to Earth.
That deserves gratitude.
YEAR: 2007
